Fresh from a workout, CJ Wilson trudges through the dimly lit Los Angeles Angels clubhouse in camo stretch pants and a hoodie, looking nothing like the well-coiffed man in the Head & Shoulders commercials. Above a bank of leather couches, flat screens blink back the day's sports. On a table near Wilson’s locker sit enough magazines to supply an entire floor of doctors’ offices.

Impervious to the surrounding creature comforts, the star pitcher picks through a half-dozen identical red undershirts while ticking off his numerous hobbies. They range from cooking to photography to script-writing to racing cars – he is the owner of a Mazda MX-5 series team.

“As a starting pitcher I don’t have to compete every day,” he says. “So all these hobbies came out of the desire to challenge myself as if there was a game to play. I end up with an energy surplus. When you challenge yourself off the field all the time you’re used to that high level of operating and you don’t slack off.

“If you’re riding a motorcycle or racing a car you can’t afford to slack off. If you get all foggy and thinking about something else, you’re going to fly off the track. In the same sense if I make an omelet, I’m fired up. I’m locked in. I have the opposite of ADD. I have hyper focus disorder.”

From Dizzy Dean to Mark Fydrich to Barry Zito, major league baseball boasts a long history of peculiar pitchers. Wilson is no different. Admittedly “out of the box”, Wilson brings to mind Bill Lee, the Boston Red Sox lefty from the 1970s. Like Lee, Wilson is left-handed, freethinking and indubitably quotable. And yet, in many ways, Wilson is the Bizarro Bill Lee.

While Lee spoke of sprinkling pot leaves on his buckwheat pancakes and espoused the mystical theories of Buckminster Fuller, Wilson is straight edge (he claims to never to have touched a beer) and an advocate of self-help giants like Tony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle. Wilson is a polymath, an autodidact and a bit of a mad scientist who promotes the benefits of training techniques with far-out names like “stress inoculation” and “visuo-motorization”. Most notably, he is a dedicated student of the art of pitching, a guy who transformed his so-so talent and became one of the best lefties in the game. In 2013, he was 17-7 with over 212 innings pitched and 188 strikeouts.

Luckily, Wilson also loves to talk. And talk. And talk. He has an opinion on just about every subject in the game and plenty outside it too. Just don’t call him a flake:

To me a flake is someone who doesn’t show up to work. A flake is somebody who goes surfing instead of working out. Growing up in California, that’s how I would describe a flake. So for me if you call someone a flake that’s a huge slap in the face. I’m a responsible guy. I do all my work.

Wilson doesn’t take days off. A little more than 12 hours removed from winning his sixth game of the season, a 6-1 victory over the Kansas City Royals, he has already endured an intense workout that includes lifting weights for his back, squats, and box jumps followed by a run.

“I also train with [an] elevation mask to simulate less oxygen,” he says. “It makes it even harder. You try to push yourself as hard as you can because today is the hardest workout day. The next couple of days it tapers off so you have enough energy for your game again.”

At 33 and in the third year of a five-year, $77.5m contract, Wilson would seem to be at the top of his profession. And yet he is constantly trying new things that might help him on the mound. In his time with the Texas Rangers, he began exploring the bounds of neuromuscular science under the tutelage of the team’s then-mental skills coach, Fran Pirozzolo, who has worked with many professional golfers.

One technique was the aforementioned visuo-motorization. The night before he pitches, Wilson goes through a tai chi-like simulation of his throwing motion. At super slow speed. In the dark.

“That sort of slow motion thing makes sense. Let’s say you want to hit a ball off a tee, just like golf. The first instinct is to go up there and just hit it, as opposed to feeling the path you need to go on.

“It just makes you more conscious of what’s happening. That body coordination thing is the ultimate key in baseball because you’re going to get out of position as a fielder. You’re going to get off-balance reaching for the ball. Not every ball is going to be hit square to you. You’re going to be on one leg. As a pitcher you’re on one leg the whole time and you’re twisting so it’s important to have good balance.”

Then there’s Wilson’s practice of stress inoculation, which comes not via the occasional beer but through thrill-seeking behavior. Wilson loves racing so much he once lived next door to a track and drove four days a week for a year. And while the Mazda MX-5 series runs concurrently with the baseball season, he gets behind the wheel whenever he can. On a recent off day, he took a brand new Porsche Turbo S for a spin at Toronto’s Mosport Raceway.

Asked if his contract prohibits such risk-taking, Wilson acknowledges that he is not allowed to get hurt, period, be it in a pick-up basketball game or behind the wheel of a 560-horsepower car. An accident could endanger the remainder of his deal. But Wilson views such hobbies as an essential part of his training:

It’s much more dangerous than pitching and it’s much more intense. Riding a motorcycle on a motocross course is way scarier than having a runner on third base. If you can keep your wits while you’re doing that or while you’re racing in a formula one car in the rain then baseball becomes much more paced as opposed to frantic.

The payoff is on the field. After all, the physical side of pitching is just one piece of the puzzle. Wilson likens it to golf, in that it’s a skill you learn and hone. But being able to translate your skill into action, especially as a pitcher, is mostly mental.

“For a lot of guys baseball becomes mentally frantic, because there are so many decisions to make. It’s like this algorithmic decision tree. 'If this guy does this, I’m going to do this. If this guy does this, I’m going to do that.' You need to have decisiveness in the moment: ‘OK, this is what I’m going to do.’ And then you somewhat have the ticker mentally like CNN at the bottom of the screen where it’s like, ‘OK, there’s information coming in and I’m sort of processing it but it’s not the main thing I’m looking at.’”

Of course, knowing what you’re going to do in the moment requires an enormous amount of preparation. Because Wilson doesn’t have overwhelming velocity, he relies on the movement of his pitches. He likens finding his spots to moving a joystick and hitting different buttons.

“It’s more the sequences and the combinations and also the visual. I watch what the guy’s trying to do and I can read the body language. You get a feel for a guy and then you become fluent in what he’s trying to do.”

“It’s like a heat map. If you throw it up here he kills it. But if you throw it down here it’s all blue and he can’t touch it. So I just memorize that stuff. I do have a gift and that’s my memory. I have a photographic memory. So when I see those heat maps I just have to watch it once and it’s in there.

“If it’s a guy I’ve seen a bunch of times I know exactly what to look for. I know what his keys are as a hitter. I know all his swings. Because that’s my job.”

'I didn't know straight edge until I was 14'

Wilson says baseball has been his job from the time he began playing, at the age of nine. Growing up in Huntington Beach, less than 15 miles from Angels Stadium, he can remember driving by car dealerships with his parents and thinking how much he wanted this or that car. He started saving up for a Ferrari Testarossa before he realized what kind of job he would need to actually own one.

CJ Wilson. Photograph: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Wilson chose baseball and stuck with it even after spending his first year of Little League as a weak-hitting left-handed third baseman. His coach, bemoaning his lack of hand-eye coordination, encouraged him to quit and try soccer. But Wilson sensed that by studying and emulating others he could be successful too. The next year, after reading The Techniques of Modern Hitting, by Wade Boggs, he became the best hitter on his team.

Physically, he was small – if anything, undersized. Wilson says that unlike most major leaguers who are usually the best guys on their team by the age of 11 or 12, he didn’t have the physical tools to match his peers until he was a sophomore in college. But even as a teenager, he was totally focused on his goal.

Before he reached high school, having witnessed an uncle struggle with substance abuse, he had sworn never to drink.

“I didn’t know what straight edge was until I was probably 14,” he says of the punk subculture that promotes abstinence from alcohol, drugs, tobacco and promiscuity. (Today, Wilson has the words Straight Edge tattooed the length of his torso and his glove bears the subculture’s XXX sign). Growing out of a song by Washington DC’s Minor Threat, by the late 1980s straight edge had spread to Wilson’s Orange County. But it wasn’t until later that he started following local bands such as Throwdown and Ignite. The music, he says, helped him cope.

“It was never just because of the music. I was straight edge because of the principles of being straight edge. I looked at it very binary. I never wanted to fit in with what other kids were doing, because that’s average. What’s the point in being average when you want to be [the] one in 30,000 kids who play Little League to reach the major leagues? It’s extremely rare.

You have no chance mathematically to make it. But you make it because you’re determined. That’s the way I looked at it. I have to be rare.

Eventually, after playing two years at Santa Ana Junior College and one at Loyola Marymount, where he was enrolled in the scriptwriting program, Wilson was drafted by the Rangers in the fifth round of the 2001 draft. He progressed through the minor leagues at a fairly fast clip until 2003, when wear and tear in his left forearm forced him to undergo Tommy John surgery.

The rehab, which lasted 18 months, proved to be a defining moment in Wilson’s life. “The nightmare of your dreams, of getting so close to them and watching them just slide down the hill when you’re injured and you miss a year and a half – it’s the worst thing ever.”

Over the last two seasons, MLB has experienced a near epidemic of elbow injuries that have required Tommy John surgery. Top young arms such as the New York Mets’ Matt Harvey and Miami Marlins’ José Fernández have gone under the knife. Wilson says that youth baseball, where kids can throw 1,000 innings before the age of 20, is one of the main culprits. The good news is the success rate of the surgery which, judged by those major leaguers that make it back to The Show, approaches 80%.

The best advice Wilson can give to those rehabbing is to use the time to take stock of how they approach the game. “You look at yourself in a honest way. 'Are my legs strong enough? Am I flexible enough? Do I eat well enough? Do I sleep well enough? Do I know enough about pitching? Do I really do all my arm-care stuff?'

“Now it becomes a lot more nuanced. And once you start learning the nuances and you start peeling away the layers it becomes much more rewarding. At least half of these guys are going to come back better because they’ll be better people.”

'My whole life hinged on this'

Wilson in action for the Texas Rangers. Photograph: John Williamson/Getty Images

Wilson has always been an avid reader. By late May he estimated he had read around 30 books (one every three to four days) from Dan Brown to the Divergent trilogy, since the start of spring training. Today, he reads mostly fiction, but at the time of his injury he was deep into a self-help kick.

“I was reading Power of Now and Stillness Speaks, all these Eckhart Tolle things, listening to audiobooks on the bus rides. But I realized at that point if I don’t embrace reality that there’s a chance if baseball doesn’t work out I’ll never be a happy person. Because my whole life hinged on this. I gave up everything as a kid just to play baseball. I was so close to losing all of it because of Tommy John surgery and the ensuing nerve damage in my arm that I had to compete with myself to be a better person. And that’s where the hobbyism started.”

Wilson decided he needed to rethink his entire lifestyle. He began by learning more about nutrition and even spent some time working as a personal trainer. He learned how to cook. He read. Sent home from rehab in August 2004, he began doing adventure training with some friends.

“We would go swimming in the ocean, jumping off rocks. I was terrified of heights. We started jumping off rocks in Laguna and I conquered my fear of heights. I thought if I can learn a foreign language, I can learn how to cook and I can conquer my fears then I can actually be a complete person with or without baseball.”

Wilson’s personal evolution hasn’t always been so smooth. In the minors, he kept to himself. He was almost always reading or listening to books on tape. In fact, at one point, he took an offseason job selling men’s clothes at Nordstrom in order to improve his people skills. Things weren’t made any easier in 2008 when, in an ESPN.com article, Wilson seemed to call out his Rangers team-mates for a lack of interest in politics.

A blogpost by Wilson shortly after the article came out didn’t help his standing in the locker room either. In it, Wilson wrote:

You have to admit the median or average guy in a baseball clubhouse does drive an SUV, drinks beer, golfs, likes college sports, chews or dips tobacco and is relatively a douchebag.

Wilson says he was just stating the facts, that Texas actually had a lot of guys from Texas and the south on the team, guys whose hobbies such as golfing or hunting he doesn’t share. But at least one of his team-mates, a player Wilson says did not like him, didn’t appreciate the blogpost and decided to print the quote and put it in everyone’s locker. Castigated for being cocky and aloof, Wilson was branded by some as an “AA meeting in cleats” and wound up being one of the most despised athletes in Dallas.

It made his free-agency jump at the end of 2011 almost a foregone conclusion. After he made the move to the Angels, Funny or Die produced a video in which a CJ Wilson stand-in promoted his own line of douches.

“I was turned into this figurehead for baseball players trying to be more political,” he says. “We’re really not. But if you don’t know what the tax rate is and you’re voting for someone who is going to increase or decrease your tax rate, and you don’t know what a guy’s policy is on schools and your kid goes to public school, then you’re just being a bad parent. That’s being uneducated. That was my tone. I think people should vote. That’s my summary. People should vote because in a lot of countries you don’t have the right to vote.”

Wilson says the whole episode made him wary of journalists and that it was never his intention to stir up any trouble. “I’m never looking for people to have a dialogue with because I’m busy. That’s the misconception. I don’t sit here waiting to talk to people about that stuff. I hate talking about that stuff. I don’t need to talk about anything. I have too much work to do.

Like this is a hassle. Getting interviewed is a hassle. Getting interviewed about stuff that has nothing to do with baseball is a hassle. But I do it because that’s the way people interview me all the time.

On the field, it took Wilson a couple of seasons to find his role in Texas. In his rookie year with the Rangers, 2005, he went 1-7 with a 6.94 ERA. He was sent down to the minors a few times. Eventually, the Rangers put him in the bullpen – where he found a niche. But it wasn’t until 2010 that he convinced the team he could be a major league starter.

Over his final two seasons in Texas, he moulded himself into a star – he won 31 games, threw over 427 innings, stuck out 352 batters and made the All-Star team twice for a club making back-to-back World Series appearances.

'You have to shift and adapt'

Still, Wilson is happy to put his time with the Rangers behind him. He still has two years and $38m left on his deal with the Angels and he recently married a Brazilian supermodel, Lisalla Montenegro. With the resources to chase his dreams, he recently opened a third Mazda dealership. He loves photography and has occasionally combined that passion with his love of racing, shooting at Daytona and the Long Beach Grand Prix. His script writing may be on hold but he continues to jot down plot ideas.

And yet Wilson’s main focus remains his pitching, which he knows won’t last forever. What he loves most about it is the opportunity to be creative, that seemingly incongruous feeling of being immersed in the moment and at the same time, as he would say, “hyper-aware”. Reflecting on the previous night’s game, he marvels on how he got through six and a third innings with the worst stuff he had in two months.

“That’s gratifying. You have to shift and adapt. Say you have a really good plan, Plan A and then something isn’t working, you have to go to Plan B or Plan C. Otherwise the game will be over right then. You have to be aware.

“I was on Plan C or Plan D last night. And that’s rare. If I’m on Plan C or Plan D usually I’ve given up a bunch of runs. I was able to avoid that by immediately recognizing that and going to Plan D right away. B and C are not going to work right now. I’m not even going to bother with those. I have to go straight to D.

“I knew at 6.52pm I didn’t have it. But it didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you have or don’t have. You have to create something. Baseball allows you the opportunity to create and interpret. You can create a little more movement. You can take a little speed off. You can change your arm angle. It’s not like golf where you have to put the ball in the hole every time. You can fall behind the count and let the other guy get himself out.

“Last night I had a couple of 3-1 counts where I threw a changeup, a very easy pitch to hit but they tried to hit a homer and they ended up popping it up instead of trying to hit a single. It’s like aikido. You use their strength and their aggressiveness against them. I wouldn’t understand that as much as I do unless I took aikido. Which I did.

“I’m not the best pitcher in the world, so part of my edge is knowing I’m not the best pitcher in the world.”